


The Force Unveiled

by CuChulainnX19



Category: Destiny (Video Games), Star Wars Legends: Force Unleashed - All Media Types
Genre: Character Development, Destiny Lore, F/M, Sith Code, sword logic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24049576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuChulainnX19/pseuds/CuChulainnX19
Summary: "This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears."Moments in the life of Starkiller as he decides what it means to be Galen Marek.
Relationships: Juno Eclipse/Galen Marek
Kudos: 16





	The Force Unveiled

From the Holocron of Toland, the Shattered:

_Imagine three great nations under three great queens. The first queen writes a great book of law and her rule is just. The second queen builds a high tower and her people climb it to see the stars. The third queen raises an army and conquers everything._

_The future belongs to one of these queens. Her rule is harshest and her people are unhappy. But she rules._

Starkiller did not learn his birth name until he was fourteen years old, the same day he committed his first political assassination. His oldest memory was of the fearsome helmet of his Master, the Sith Lord Darth Vader, who had overseen his upbringing since Starkiller was a child.

“Peace is a lie, there is only passion.”

He felt no remorse in killing for Darth Vader. He feared his Master, hated him sometimes, but he would never regret carrying out his Master’s commands, nor would he cease to. Darth Vader had shaped him into an instrument of his will. 

“Through passion, I gain strength.”

Starkiller had only one passion: to serve Darth Vader, and by his service to become worthy of true apprenticeship. His life admitted no others, for he had never known anything else, nor did he wonder what might have been. It would not have compared, and in any case it—whatever it was—did not exist. He simply was Darth Vader’s secret blade.

“Through strength, I gain victory.” 

The strength belonged to Darth Vader, and therefore the victory as well. Starkiller existed only by his consent, and therefore would assume the shape that Darth Vader desired. He would be the blade that struck down his enemies, ensuring no challenge against him could arise… and one day, Darth Vader would wield him to claim the sovereignty that was his by right, supreme power over all the galaxy.

_This explains everything, understand? This is why the universe is the way it is, and not some other way. Existence is a game that everything plays, and some strategies are winners: the ability to exist, to shape existence, to remake it so that your descendants - molecules or stars or people or ideas - will flourish, and others will find no ground to grow._

_And as the universe ticks on towards the close, the great players will face each other. In the next round there will be three queens and all of them will have armies, and now it will be a battle of swords - until one discovers the cannon, or the plague, or the killing word._

The Jedi had been weak. Not worthless, by any means: only Kota’s own moment of distraction had allowed Starkiller to best him, and Paratus had been as deadly as he had been mad… on Master Shaak Ti he did not wish to reflect. But all has been weaker than he, and thus his saber had bested them.

Someday, there would be no more Jedi at all. The thought was almost disappointing; the price of total victory, after all, was the loss of worthwhile challengers. Still, that would not be the end. The Sith, lone keepers of the knowledge and power of the Force, would live on, and someday Starkiller would train his own apprentice. 

He pushed aside the idea with a shudder. To become the Master, he would have to defeat his own, and the notion of turning his blade against Darth Vader seemed as blasphemous as it did futile. There was long enough, besides, until they would be prepared to strike against the Emperor, and long after that Starkiller would remain Darth Vader’s apprentice.

Idly, he wondered how Juno would fit into such a world. Of course, as the right hand of Emperor Vader, he could do as he wished with his personal guard. Still, hers was not a temper made for the world of final victory: he knew she lamented, privately, the bombing of Callos, and worried for his safety. Concern and regret were not the emotions of a Sith Lord, and would only endanger her and pose a weakness for him. The Emperor was cunning, and would yield no quarter or leverage in their battle.

She would probably be dead by then, either at Vader’s hand or the hands of a rebel or an assassin, he tried to think dismissively. Somehow, that didn’t quite help.

_Everything is becoming more ruthless and in the end only the most ruthless will remain -[LOOK UP AT THE SKY]- and they will hunt the territories of the night and extinguish the first glint of competition before it can even understand what it faces or why it has transgressed. This is the shape of victory: to rule the universe so absolutely that nothing will ever exist except by your consent. This is the queen at the end of time, whose sovereignty is eternal because no other sovereign can defeat it. And there is no reason for it, no more than there was reason for the victory of the atom. It is simply the winning play._

The second time Vader betrayed him, Galen could hardly find it in himself to be surprised. He didn’t have much time for shock, as his Master moved quickly to humiliate and destroy him, but he had time to witness the expression of disappointment on Bail Organa’s face, to sense Juno’s horror, and to hear as Vader, standing above him on the cliff, dismembered his loyal PROXY.

He shouldn’t have been surprised, he thought, as his grip gave—or perhaps the ice under his hand had slipped, betrayed once again by circumstances beyond his control. After all, the Emperor had already won. Had turned Vader in the first place, taught him everything he knew of the Dark Side, proved himself infinitely more cunning. Betrayal was the way of the Sith, for he who was wiliest would always be the last one standing.

“Through victory, my chains are broken.”

Galen had lived his entire life in chains, bound as securely as any bloodied Wookie slave. Darth Vader had been his master: a man too straightforward to outwit the Emperor, but bound well enough to the Emperor’s will that his obedience could fool a simpler tool like Starkiller.

Abruptly, he shook himself, or tried to. His senses sharpened, focusing on the bite of the cold and the ache in his back where he had struck the stones of the building and where he had fallen from the cliff. In the Force, Juno’s presence grew clearer, along with her unwillingness to lose him—to lose to Vader—a second time. Galen was through losing to Vader as well, and he would not let this loss, this double betrayal wrapped in a mockery of devotion, reach its conclusion. 

He no longer served Vader, but he would destroy the Emperor regardless, and the Empire along with him.

“The Force shall set me free.”

_Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears._

_But I do not think those spears will hold against the queen of the country of armies. And that is all that will matter in the end._

The rain on Kamino was unceasing, the entire planet covered in oceans and perpetual storm clouds, but neither the rain nor anything else could bother Galen now, not even the sight of his former Master. Vader was disarmed, literally, at his hands, and Juno had survived the Sith enforcer’s brutality. The original Galen’s memories were still fragmented, but he felt more himself every moment; Kota’s suggestion that Vader might reveal the first Starkiller’s fate held no interest for Galen. His old self, he felt with certainty, was dead, but that did not make him a mere copy, not when none of the other clones had been able to function as more than single-minded thralls.

Even now, of course, nothing was certain. He had come to care for Juno before his death, and she for him, feelings that had only strengthened in each of them during his… period of nonexistence. But their first kiss had been an act of impulse, a decision by Juno to taste, quickly, what she would soon lose the chance to explore with him. Now, waymarked though it was with Vader’s interrogation and execution, and with the demands of the war against the Empire, the entire galaxy was open before them.

She had mentioned once that Dantooine had beautiful flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> The parts in italics are from the Destiny Grimoire card "Ghost Fragment 3: Darkness," available online at the Ishtar Collective, although the title is a reference to the Lore book "Unveiling." I find Toland's lore, and the parallels and divergences between the Force and the Light/Darkness, fascinating, and when I came across this old game and found the inspiration for an opportunity to play with all of that in a short, manageable fic I had to take it.
> 
> The Force Unleashed II is also very fun but unfortunately sidelines Juno; my personal headcanon (I haven't read any comics or such) is that the original Galen's Force essence basically merged with X-2 — thus leaving the DA free to become his own person: soulless, obedient, and inexplicably nowhere to be found. The mention of Dantooine is purely a reference to the Black Garden/the Flower Game, described elsewhere in Unveiling.


End file.
